By now you’ve all heard the Fox News report last week that “unnamed” former McCain advisers

leaked that Sarah Palin was confused about whether Africa was a continent, and which countries were in NAFTA. I was perfectly happy staying under the radar as an anonymous source for Fox News‘ Carl Cameron, but now that Palin has accused her accusers of being “unprofessional…jerks…cowards… taking things out of context, and then tried to spread something on national news” and begun to cast doubt on the Fox News report, maybe she’s right to a certain extent. For those of us on the McCain campaign who thought that she acted like a rogue diva and lost John the election, maybe we DO have a responsibility to come out in public. But Sarah… careful what you ask for: some of us may have more to reveal.

So yes, to be clear, last week I was the one who leaked those things to a producer at Fox News who works with Cameron. Carl and his producers are good guys, and I don’t want them to have to worry about protecting their sources (and going through the wringer ala Judith Miller or Matt Cooper) on something like this.

The story turns out to be as believable as the original leaks were.

That is, they were a hoax.

Some reported on the Eisenstadt revelation; some didn't.

The hoax was caught fairly quickly and alerts issued. MSNBC broadcast the hoax as fact before they caught it. Anyone who watched MSNBC's election coverage couldn't tell any difference in the network's accuracy--either before or after the hoax broadcast.

But we say, whether you wrote or broadcast it or not: it was discovered quickly, so no harm, no foul.

Note: A dinky site would notice the Hot Air traffic. Not only is Michael Crowley a dupe (as I was), but now he's a dishonest one, pretending that he discovered the hoax on his own.

The only thing we'd disagree with Ace about is the "dupe" label.

Once upon a time, the media reported news. If the news turned out to be false, they reported that also. Then, the name of the media game became, "We're going to hold stories until every last detail can be confirmed".

Fine.

But that policy then morphed into, "We're going to hold stories that we don't think readers have the finely-tuned understanding and reasoning skills about which to make a judgment".

Finally, that policy became--at many MSM outlets--"We're going to hold stories that we don't agree with or that we think are detrimental to our editorial policy".

That policy was responsible for ABC's refusal to air one minute of coverage on the John Edwards scandal--until Edwards turned up on ABC's Nightline on August 8 and started talking about mistresses and babies and hush money and getting caught in the Beverly Hilton.

Imagine ABC viewers' surprise when they learned that the story had been on-going for ten months and they were kept in the dark.

The New York Times, MSNBC, Washington Post, CBS, and the LA Times, among others, duped their readers/viewers for months during the primary and general elections on any number of unreported topics concerning Barack Obama.

They are duping them still on the issue of climate change, though that will be harder to pull off--especially when their news customers are digging out from underneath three feet of global warming.

So, the Eisenstadt 'confession' about the Sarah Palin leaks was a hoax.

Big deal.

It was quickly exposed in the blogosphere. Meanwhile, the other hoaxes which pass for 'news' in daily Mainstream Media reporting continue.

The Eisenstadt hoax was discovered and reported upon. It's a mistake to think that anyone reporting on the original story somehow had their credibility harmed when they quickly reported that it was a sham story.

The man-made climate change hoax has been discovered, but remains largely unreported in the Mainstream Media.

It's when long-running stories have two sides and readers/viewers only hear one of them from supposed "objective news sources" that credibility--and bottom lines--plunge.